The first Senate hearing to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is beginning. Expect the Democrats to put on a show of resistance while effectively letting the Republicans steamroll them. Watch the live stream after the jump.
This morning in Republican steamrolling of Democrats, via The Washington Post:
Hours before the start of hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the lawyer for former president George W. Bush turned over 42,000 pages of documents from the nominee’s service in the Bush White House, angering Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, who issued what is certain to be a futile call to delay the proceedings.
This follows last week's crumple, via Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur:
Senate just cut a deal to fast-track votes starting at 3:45p today on 11 nominations—including SEVEN Trump nominees to be district court judges.
UPDATE: Fireworks have begun with Democrats demanding hearing adjourn and protesters have disrupted the hearings.
Video below via The Washington Post.
Image via USGov [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
That said, there is one chance to address the SC situation, and that is to make sure that Dem voters in all states possible vote in the Senate contests. While the House races are gerrymandered (and we just saw that North Carolina will continue using a district pattern that’s been expressly forbidden in court), the Senate races can’t be manipulated. If the Dems can hold their seats and pick up 2, the Dems will have a chance to replace Clarence Thomas, which would swing the majority on the court to the other side. If the Dems don’t put their efforts into the Senate, then Thomas will undoubtedly step down in 2019 and be replaced by a 40-45 year old equivalent, and THAT would be it for the next 30 years.
The Right Wing is happily gloating about this situation, as we knew they would, and they’ll be happily gloating with each major 5-4 ruling we see from the new edition of the SC – particularly when they overturn Roe within the next two years in a series of rulings that first strip it of meaning and then completely reverse it. But at the least this will prove to some commentators that it really does matter who gets elected, since we kept hearing from those people that the GOP would never seriously try to overturn Roe or do anything that extreme with the Supreme Court. I think we can say that argument has been put to bed.